Ditema tsa Dinoko / isiBheqe soHlamvu / Xifungho xa Manungu / Vhuga ha Madungo is an indigenous script designed for the phonologies of the siNtu languages. It is inspired by the preeminent ideographic traditions of Southern Africa, such as litema mural art of Lesotho, the related isiNdebele tradition of ukugwala and other symbolic crafts, like the regional beadwork containing ideograms and morphograms, which in isiZulu tradition are called amabheqe.

It was crafted with the goal of designing a more efficient writing system to remedy the slowness in reading the highly agglutinative languages of the region as in the roman alphabet, the syllables are made of numerous multigraphs.

Languages written in the script include ones that have no standardised Latin orthography, such as Eastern Sotho languages like sePulana and the majority of the Tekela languages.

A diacritic that indicates vowel nasality, known as ingungwanyana, is provided specifically for the Tekela languages.

As with the Latin orthographies, there is no provision for vowel length nor tone, which can generally be inferred from context.

 

Description

The script is an indigenous nucleocentric syllable-based (partially-iconographic) featural writing system.

 

Consonants, vowels and featural elements are combined into syllabic blocks (amabheqe). Except when the syllable being transcribed is a syllabic nasal, the letters are based on a triangular or chevron-shaped grapheme that indicates the vowel of the syllable, with the attached ongwaqa indicating the onset consonants.

Syllabic nasals are written as circles that fill the whole ibheqe or syllable block.